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BlueIndy, an electric car sharing service set to become the biggest of its kind in the country, yesterday launched in Indianapolis, Indiana. Founded by French billionaire Vincent Bolloré’s Bolloré Group, which already runs similar successful programs in France, the American version will start with 500 cars and 1,000 charging stations at 200 locations.

“For me, Indianapolis is a city of the car – when I was young I am very impressed by the races,” said Bolloré over the phone from Indianapolis. “A 1 million person city, it is quite representative of cities in the world.”

“We want to demonstrate the electric car is not only a very high priced toy for VIPs,” said Bolloré, whose Bolloré Group makes proprietary lithium-metal-polymer batteries for its vehicles. “I think you can increase the number of cars in the cities and decrease the level of pollution.”

Indianapolis will be home to America’s largest electric car-sharing service

The move is the next step in Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard’s crusade to help the city go green. Since forming its first Office of Sustainability in 2008, Ballard has launched incentives to encourage sustainable construction and signed on to convert the government’s entire municipal non-police fleet to electric cars by 2025. Speaking on a call from the city’s Indy 500 track, Mayor Ballard says the program will function “kind of alike a bike-share,” with a subscription service plus rental costs of about $10 an hour.

“We don’t have mass transit at the global level that we should,” noted Mayor Ballard. “We do have 80,000 university students in the area.”

As well as students, who will likely act as early adopters, the city has major corporations like pharmaceuticals Eli Lilly and Company, Simon Property GroupSimon Property Group and Roche Diagnostics on board, who see the service as a way to get their employees from one part of campus to another.

The Bolloré group is investing $35 million in the project to provide the cars and infrastructure, while Indianapolis Power & Light will spend $16 million to install the charging stations. Mayor Ballard believes the program will be profitable in 5-7 years, though it could be far sooner – the Paris program was expected to be profitable in 5 years but began earning in a year and a half.

A Gulf War veteran who served as a marine for 23 years, Republican Mayor Ballard is passionate about ending America’s reliance on foreign oil. “We spend enormous amount of money not just on the wars but on the infrastructure that allows us to send money to people that want to do us harm,” Ballard said.

“It’s important for national security to not only look at our own resources but provide countries like China and India with a model so they don’t have to use those resources either.”

Paul Mitchell, CEO of non-profit clean-tech consortium Energy Systems Network which helped plan the Indianapolis service, said: “To be honest my initial reaction was ‘I’m not sure this will work.’ There are a lot of differences between our city and Paris.”

Mitchell took a trip to Paris to test out the program and came away pleasantly surprised. “I have driven every electric vehicle on the market but Bolloré’s suite of technologies and the vertical integration of those solutions is so seamless it just works.”

The BlueIndy cars, which can travel around 150 miles per charge, will be a slightly altered version of their Parisian cousins, with Indianapolis models sporting a modified chassis to provide more headroom and a polished paint job.

Launched in 2011, The Bolloré Group’s Autolib Service in Paris has been a runaway success, used by 140,000 subscribers who have taken 5 million trips to date. The group has since launched Bluely in Lyon and Bluecub in Bordeaux; the city of London just brought the group on to run its electric car sharing program.

“It took three years for the General MotorsGeneral Motors and Nissans of the world to sell the first 100,000 the electric cars globally and the total number sold is still less than half a million globally,” said Mitchell. “This might be the way that electric vehicles could reach a broader number of users.”

Bollore believes the Group’s ability to offer a total solution – they make the cars, the batteries and the computer programs to run them – makes them a go-to for cities. “In London they had six different companies and it was a mess – they discovered they need a unique party responsible,” said Bolloré.

Bolloré Group is 80% controlled by the Bolloré family; Vincent is the 6th generation to run the company which was founded in 1822. As well as the U.K. and France, Bolloré says the group is beginning to pursue electric car services in Cambodia and Hong Kong.

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